Creating a Test Machine (on prem)

1. Creating a Test Machine (on prem)

i want to start a discussion on how to create a test machine with production data. why? because it took us quite a while to make that work. the documentation of moving data seems faulty or at least not complete. i want to gather information in this thread on how people actually made that work or also on how they failed so we can prevent that in the future.

maybe jama could use gathered information here on updating their official documentation or to create an official how to on how to create a test machine with production data.

what we did:1.) the first try to create a test machine was to export the data from the production system into a .jama file and reload it on a fresh jama installation and into a fresh database. what we also did was to copy over the folders from /data which were pointed out in the documentation (rsync which kept permissions and owner). we did as written in the first sentence, but populating the database failed with the following error messages in contour.log

2018-11-20 11:29:15,384 WARN StreamingIterator jamacontour [c94660] [com.jamasoftware.contour.util.dbunit.ContourFlatXmlProducer] - Extra columns (mimetype) on line 30402 for table attachment (global line number is 36700). Those columns will be ignored. Please add the extra columns to line 1, or use a DTD to make sure the value of those columns are populated or specify 'columnSensing=true' for your FlatXmlProducer. See FAQ for more details.

I was wondering why this import is not working with a fresh installation of jama and a new database? has anyone else experienced a similar issue with restoring a .jama or .xml file?

2.) the next try was to clone the whole database and point a fresh installed jama to the cloned database and of course copy over the mentioned folders again. what we experienced here was that jama was not able to write in the database because it was not empty (error message in the admin interface) and so jama did not start up. so that did also not work at first. for us changing the line in /data/tenant/tenant.properties fromjamacontour.provisioningState=ERRORtojamacontour.provisioningState=DONEdid the trick. either changing that line after the first start of jama, were this is created or maybe copying over the folder from the production system should solve the problem. but if you copy you need to update the db-name in the file also, if you changed it.

conclusion:in the end creating a test machine is the same as taking a backup and trying to restore the production machine again, and it troubles me a little that not one of the from jama recommended ways seem to work without issues.

thanks for reading and hopefully there are some useful replies,best regards